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May 25, 2017

Smartphone Q1 Stats including Installed Base (now with forked Android data also included) - hey, a new brand into Top 10

Time for Q1 Quarterly data for smartphone market. We do have a new brand into the Top 10. And I will now report the forked Android slice in the installed base, as we finally can estimate that number from solid sources. So lets do the market overall. The average of the big analyst houses gives us a total market size in calendar Quarter 1 (January-March) of 2017 as 350.4 million smartphones sold globally. That is up 5% compared to the same quarter a year ago. This period is the gift-giving season in China and Chinese sales (and brands) tend to overshadow others in this quarter. If the full year continues on a 5% growth path, we'd look at about 1.55 Billion total smartphones sold this year. Lets do the big table:

Source: TomiAhonen Consulting Analysis 25 May 2017, based on manufacturer and industry dataThis table may be freely shared

Thats the big table. Newcomer Gionee is of course from China. Did you even notice who is no longer in the table? Yeah, Xiaomi has now dropped out of the Top 10. TCL/Alcatel and ZTE can hang on because of their large international footprint, even if they have a hard time in China, they still sell enough in volume to be more stable in their standings. And for LG, gotta say in this China gift-giving period, good job to climb back to number 6 and for their business, they're at about break-even to return to profits again if they're lucky. Samsung is of course the biggest. Apple is safe in second place, with Huawei lurking back there solidly in third rank.

The OS wars is 85% Andorid, 14.5% iOS and about half a percent more or less, all others. But note, of Android, one third are forked AOSP devices (maybe more this quarter with China sales at its annual peak level)

Source: TomiAhonen Consulting Analysis 25 May 2017, based on manufacturer and industry dataThis table may be freely shared

Industry sits at 3.2 Billion smartphones in use globally. 4 out of 5 smartphones in use has some version of Android on it, the rest are iPhones (lots of older iPhones still in circulation, Apple's installed base is significantly higher than its actual sales percentage, as the device has a passionate following). I now separate out also the pure Google Android ie Play Store capable devices and the forked Androids ie AOSP (Android Open Source Platform) devices mostly out of China and India. They are 32% of all Androids in use, so 26% of all smartphones in use.

@readandlearn You're either trolling or grossly misinformed. Android's way to solve the update issue is to move ever more stuff out of the OS.
On iOS, even an app like iClip requires an OS update.
On Android, even core OS features like WebView, Dialer, Pay, Health, Home and security updates don't.

Using OS version as an indicator of whether phones are up to date is meaningless and, at best, utterly misinformed.

As for Sony I think their CEO told that they will remain in the phone business. If they pull out it will be to hard to make a comeback later. They must be in the space with all new IOT stuff that are coming. And they also sell camera sensors to other brands etc...

For Nokia I think its to early since they will not be globaly until the end of june. So for some statistics there we must wait for some more months.

Rumours says T-Mobile will making own phones in the US market (probably made by TCL)
And if the specs/price is great it might affect Samsung and iPhone/Apple duapoly in USA. So the smartphone wars are not over, seems a lot of things will happend during this year.

While they are member of the OHA, Nokia can only release code from Android on devices that pass official Android compatibility testing. So this seems very unlikely, unless Nokia decides to reimplement everything from scratch without even a line of AOSP code.

@Wayne: AOSP is based on GNU/LINUX and hence falls under the GPL (GNU Public License). Hence Google cannot nake it closed source.

What Google _CAN_ do is to start from scratch and create a Play Services-compatible OS which has its own license, though. And Google is doing exactly this, it is called "Project Fuchsia". See here: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/googles-fuchsia-smartphone-os-dumps-linux-has-a-wild-new-ui/

AOSP also _IS_ the full OS, you can use it without the PlayStore and the other Google Services by simply using another App Store like Amazon or F-Driod.

The problem is only that you don't have Google Maps, GMail, Google Drive and all the other stuff which isn't part of AOSP. Competing with this is very hard for everybody, just take the failure of the Amazon smartphone as an example. Of course it's not impossible, so let's see what the future brings.

First of all, it's not like Android would have problems regarding compatibility between different versions, so customers are hardly affected. Except regarding security patches, of course.

But here also the carriers are to blame, which often don't roll out security patches for older phones despite getting an update from the OEM. This behaviour does not exactly encourage OEMs to provide updates either. As long as customers don't vote with their wallets, nothing will change.

Secondly, differences between different devices was an Android feature a few years ago. Lots of features were introduced by OEMs first and then a few years later by Google. Like tethering, dual windows, quick settings etc.

Android 7.X includes all of this natively, so there is less need for OEM-modified Android versions from the average customer's point of view now. But Android only became the dominant smartphone OS by allowing OEMs to differentiate their Android versions, so it's difficult to get the genie back into teh bottle now.

The issue of "fragmentation", and what Wayne Brady describes are nothing new at all.

Developers faced the same difficulty with Java ME, and have been tackling the same problem with the mobile (and non-mobile) Web and browser fragmentation for ever. And before that, the issue popped up when developing software supporting the GUI of Unix, Windows and Mac.

Fragmentation will _always_ be with us. It is unavoidable when developing _universal_ services, i.e. those that do not just work on the recent version of one OS from one manufacturer offering a limited device selection with one form factor in one price category.

No, it is not easy, but that's life. Anyway, in the past two decades, techniques have been developed to cope with all that, and professionals rely upon them all the time. Mind the term "cope" -- not "solve".

It was only completed when Nokias then CEO eFlop announced that something is burning and some company with a bad history will fix it.

That panicked everybody in the industry because they did not have the response for iPhone. Google did because the mole had seen one. The mole was member of the board at Apple from Google. Google did unfortunately understand how iPhone really works.

Ok, as many of you already know, I keep track of Apple vs rest of world global average and also keep around a linear toy model for predictions. Why Apple vs rest? Because it is Android vs Rest now, so this is the only interesting border left to check.

So, Apple fared slightly worse than predicted, while Android did better than predicted. I'll keep doing these over the entire year, revising as new data comes in. Of course, if iPhone 8 becomes a new iPhone 6 moment, then Apple will once again regain market share, but right now it looks like they will slowly slide downward.

Available for Consulting and Speakerships

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Tomi Ahonen is a bestselling author whose twelve books on mobile have already been referenced in over 100 books by his peers. Rated the most influential expert in mobile by Forbes in December 2011, Tomi speaks regularly at conferences doing about 20 public speakerships annually. With over 250 public speaking engagements, Tomi been seen by a cumulative audience of over 100,000 people on all six inhabited continents. The former Nokia executive has run a consulting practise on digital convergence, interactive media, engagement marketing, high tech and next generation mobile. Tomi is currently based out of Helsinki but supports Fortune 500 sized companies across the globe. His reference client list includes Axiata, Bank of America, BBC, BNP Paribas, China Mobile, Emap, Ericsson, Google, Hewlett-Packard, HSBC, IBM, Intel, LG, MTS, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Ogilvy, Orange, RIM, Sanomamedia, Telenor, TeliaSonera, Three, Tigo, Vodafone, etc. To see his full bio and his books, visit www.tomiahonen.com Tomi Ahonen lectures at Oxford University's short courses on next generation mobile and digital convergence. Follow him on Twitter as @tomiahonen. Tomi also has a Facebook and Linked In page under his own name. He is available for consulting, speaking engagements and as expert witness, please write to tomi (at) tomiahonen (dot) com

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